Since the last I played Gundam two weeks ago, I have gotten the pieces needed to build a brand new deck for myself.
Still in Red/Green as I have been, but with a very different, much less aggressive style of deck than my Zeon list. I got all of the pieces I needed for it over the course of my last work week, and today was the first time I even shuffled the deck, let alone played with it.
Given that it was my first time playing, I fully expected some "growing pains", as it were - or, more plainly, I fully expected to come out of the day with a losing record. We wound up with four rounds of play today, and I got the bye in round 4, which technically evened me out to a 2-2. Though, for practical purposes, it's still fair to say I had my expected losing record, going 1-2 in my actual games.
Game 1 vs Red-Blue Aggro - Loss
So here we go, my very first game with this Clan list. I won the roll and chose to go second, and the EX Resource was incredibly useful in helping me to actually play the game at a proper pace, letting me drop Police Zaku on my first turn, the level 3 Sugai's Gelgoog on my second, and generally being able to keep pressure up as the game went on.
However, Clan is much more of a "midrange" deck than an aggro or control list, so my opponent - playing an aggro deck as they were - was very much able to outpace me in the long run. I did no small amount of damage to their shields, and if they hadn't had a Gundam and an Amuro in hand on their last turn, I would likely have won the game out, by their own unprompted admission after the fact.
On that note, as this was my first event running this deck, and this was in fact my very first game with the deck on top of that, I asked my opponent if, from their perspective, I had really made any major misplays as far as they could tell. The only thing they could offer was that I may have been slightly too greedy on what wound up my final turn, swinging in to take out two of their Shields. Given their board state at the time, which included an Aegis Gundam (MA Mode) that had Breach 3, along with a bevy of other units, I ran the risk of giving them a pilot to be able to get a hasted unit and have an easier time of finishing me off. However, they also added the caveat that given the circumstances at the time - my own heavily-loaded board included - even that they couldn't fully consider a wholesale mistake. They just outraced me, and it was a tremendously close game despite that.
Game 2 vs Red-Green Clan - Win
What were the odds that my first event with Clan, I would run into a mirror match? Well, evidently pretty good all things considered.
I won the roll and chose second again, and the EX Resource again proved to be invaluable.
An oddity with this game was that I never saw any copies of either of my two pilots, so I was forced to play more defensively. My deck's handful of ping effects were incredibly useful for removing a few of their threats and I was able to take control of the later stages of the game. One of the biggest cinchers of the positive momentum for me was the fact that I successfully hit a unit off of my Level 7 GQuuuuuuX, whereas they whiffed theirs a turn or two later. In spite of my lack of pilots, this meant I was able to keep the better board presence, and I was able to run over the rest of their shields.
To be fair, however, I did end the game with Shuji's Hideout in my base zone as my only remaining "shield" when the game was all said and done.
Game 3 vs Green-White Wing - Loss
Sort of the opposite of my first game, this was a much slower deck with a host of blockers buying time to ramp up into the Operation: Meteor team. Or, more specifically, into Wing and Wing Zero. This was also the one game today where I lost the roll and had to go first, meaning I lacked the EX Resource, which was incredibly felt in the first few turns of the game.
I tried to play as aggressively as I could, hoping to take them down before they could get to 8 and drop Zero on me, but unfortunately I did not succeed. They were also being weirdly conservative with their blocks, it felt like, but I think that was mostly because they weren't quite big enough for their blockers to trade with my attackers. Shuji on the level 3 Sugai's Gelgoog is pretty good, as it turns out.
As I said, I wasn't able to break through them in time to stop Zero from hitting the field, and with the damage that they had done to my other units, Wing Zero's deploy effect wiped a not-insignificant part of my field, and the Wing Zero was very much able to make relatively quick work of the Shuji's Hideout I had been trying to hide behind, as well as my handful of remaining shields, before an Aile Strike with Kira Yamato came down to finish me off once I was defenseless.
The main mistake my opponent could offer when I asked was that they felt that I had perhaps used my Level 5 GQuuuuuuX a little too early on in the game, given the power of its beefy stat-line and its on-Link First Strike to take out one of their stronger units without retaliation later on in the game.
Conclusion
With a bye on round 4, as I said, I came out with a 2-2 record technically, and ended the event in 4th out of 9 players. Pretty middle of the pack finish, but I'll take it. The past few events I've been able to attend, I was doing significantly worse, only getting 12th or 13th out of 15 players. The best I've done in the past was a 5th place finish out of 12 players, and even then that was months ago.
As for the Clan deck, I honestly can't say enough good about the list, honestly. It's definitely a pretty limited deck given the fairly small list of available cards for the archetype, my Round 2 Mirror Match and I comparing lists after the event was finished for the day and looking at some of the spoiled cards for the next set release to compare notes on what we think about the few new Clan cards that will be coming out. Neither of us thinks that GD03 is going to really offer Clan much of anything worthwhile, though the new Level 8 GQuuuuuuX and the MAV Tactics command might have some teeth for the deck.
Regardless, despite the limited card pool for Clan, playing it felt to me like the majority of the parts I like the most from Zeon, but with a few of the weaknesses smoothed out. The fact that the deck doesn't get to really "start" playing until 4 Resources means that I didn't find myself dumping my hand and getting stuck in top-deck mode at any point in the day, because I had to be much more careful with what needed to be played instead of just going all-out aggressive.
"Schoolgirl and Smuggler" letting me dig through the top of my deck and draw a card with almost no restrictions, versus Zeon's "Turning Point of History" which requires having a Newtype Pilot in play to get the actual card draw from it, means that, to me at least, "Schoolgirl and Smuggler" feels significantly stronger as a level 1 "draw" spell.
The addition of a few ping effects, even if they're mostly conditional, along with the general resilience of the units compared to Zeon, the one-turn First Strike of the Level 5 GQuuuuuuX, and the sheer, bonkers power of the Level 7 GQuuuuuuX dropping an entire extra unit onto the table makes the deck feel significantly "sturdier". It's not as much of a glass cannon as Zeon is, even if I did still wind up kind of folding in the face of the blockers (and the practical board wipe from Wing Zero) from the Green-White Wing in round 3. But the ability of the deck to swarm the field as well as it did in spite of most of its units being Level 4 and higher was frankly impressive.
I'm really looking forward to playing the deck more in future Gundam events, though I don't know if I'll be playing Gundam on my next off-week. I believe it's a prerelease event for the next Starter deck? A deck that I don't think I've got much interest in, at that.
So it'll be some time I next shuffle up the Clan. Still. I am genuinely looking forward to it.
No comments:
Post a Comment